


names for sides

by NeverNooitNiet



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angel Crowley (Good Omens), Demon Aziraphale (Good Omens), Drunken Confessions, Fluff, Idiots in Love, M/M, Post-Canon, look just go with it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-09
Updated: 2019-02-09
Packaged: 2019-10-25 03:48:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17717477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeverNooitNiet/pseuds/NeverNooitNiet
Summary: In which Aziraphale is suddenly a demon, and Crowley suddenly is not, and things don't change as much as they might expect.Well. Maybe one thing does.





	names for sides

It is a fairly well-documented fact that if angels misbehave or generally displease Heaven often enough, it is child’s play to kick them out and have them become demons. It is slightly less-well known that Hell has a fairly similar policy, only backwards. It isn’t used very often, because Hell can usually solve any staff issues with a nice bit of extreme violence, but when even that won’t fix the underlying issues… well.  Many angels throughout the ages have felt as though they should be against this on principle, as to become a demon one had to have been previously kicked out of Heaven in the first place, but then in their admittedly rather limited worldview it was generally assumed that anything that wasn’t a very good demon was probably quite a good angel. And it was all ineffable anyway. So that was alright then.

Crowley looked in the mirror somewhat skeptically. _Doubting already? That doesn't bode well_ , he thought vaguely, but then he certainly didn’t _look_ particularly angelic, or leastways not any more angelic than he always had: his wings were white, yes, but then they’d always been white and would presumably always continue to be so, provided he kept up his old demonic routines of cleanliness. Or even if he didn’t, actually— he didn’t think Aziraphale had groomed his wings so much as once since the dawn of creation, and yet when he’d gotten them out at the airbase, they’d still been a bright and shining, white as— as a very white thing, Crowley thought lamely, mildly distracted by the faint undercurrent of panic that was still twisting through his thoughts, and indeed had been ever since Down There had announced that morning that they’d quite like to have a little chat.

His cheekbones were still high, his hair was still dark, and he was fairly sure his hiss was as irritatingly present as ever. His eyes, of course, had been personally fucked-up by God Herself, so there had been no hope of fixing them. They stared back at him in the mirror, bright and snakelike as ever, although they might have been ever so slightly more golden than yellow now.

Maybe. If you squinted.

Perhaps more worryingly, he didn’t particularly _feel_ any different. Oh, he knew he was an angel, now, the same way he’d always known he was a demon, before— it was just something you _felt_ , deep inside you, something to do with auras and ineffability, all the things that helped the universe tick along quite nicely but which were, in Crowley’s own unhumble opinion, frustratingly convoluted and really rather dull if you were just an entity trying very hard to live in it. Still, though. There was no sudden overwhelming desire to do help humanity or go and pray or watch the bloody Sound of Music or anything, and certainly no great warm aura of God’s love. He’d always known Aziraphale was making that one up, the bugger. Great warm aura of bloodyminded self-righteousness, more like.

Aziraphale _. Christ._

It took Crowley a few seconds to notice that the expletive didn’t burn the way it usually did, and he blinked. He was going to have to find himself a new repertoire of swear words, and quickly.

The transition from demon back to angel hadn’t felt nearly as exciting as he’d been expecting, either. The Fall was burned into Crowley’s mind as a really rather unpleasant experience, but this had felt… remarkably average. Bit tingly, maybe, but that was it.

But then, as the humans were so bloody fond of saying, it was never really the fall, or Fall, in this case, that got you, was it? It was the landing. And crashing down helter-skelter with his limbs everywhere and his wings in a right state and fire seemingly everywhere had, if you’d excuse the pun, made for one quite literal Hell of a landing.

Crowley pondered over this for a few moments, peered back at the mirror to see if he’d magically sprouted a halo or anything, and sighed. He was stalling, and he knew it. Because sooner or later, he was going to have to go and talk to Aziraphale.

He didn’t particularly know what would constitute a good reaction from the angel. But his mind, jittery and nervous as ever— so angels could still get anxiety then, wonderful— had helpfully already formulated a few thousand nightmare scenarios for him.

He didn’t want the angel to react coldly and horribly and to reject him, or anything, obviously. But at the same time… he didn’t want Aziraphale to embrace him, and tell him he’d been saved, or that Crowley was fundamentally _better_ now. Because the more Crowley thought about it, the more he reckoned that he wasn’t, really. There had been nothing wrong with him as a demon, he didn’t think. Some of his fellow demons had been pretty horrible, yes, but, well, so were some of the angels. Look at bloody Gabriel, for one.

Crowley sighed again and took a deep breath to steady himself, reapplying his sunglasses and artfully messing with his hair until it was just the right sort of tousled. He nodded awkwardly at his reflection, and then left.

 

A surprisingly short amount of time later, considering, Crowley was stood outside the achingly familiar, well-weathered door to Aziraphale’s bookshop. Just because he was an angel now didn’t mean that pesky things like speed limits were going to start applying to him.

Crowley took one last deep, steadying, albeit completely unnecessary breath, and then pushed open the shop door.

A demon stared back at him.

 _Aziraphale_ stared back at him.

Crowley blinked. It made sense, he supposed. If Hell had been so ticked off with him after the whole Armageddon business that they’d made him an angel again to get him out from under their feet (or _above_ , metaphorically, if you liked,) it was logical that Heaven would respond in much the same way. Ineffability, Crowley was finding, seemed to be more about balance than anything.

Still, it was oddly jarring, seeing Aziraphale as a demon. Physically, he still looked exactly the same, which was to say vaguely like an anthropomorphised version of a tartan sofa. Crowley thought his eyes might be a shade darker, now, but then, that might just have been the lighting. More importantly, he still _felt_ like Aziraphale, like the soft turn of crinkled pages and fussiness and cold, forgotten cups of tea, which, when eventually remembered, would often be drunk anyway, with a forced sort of stoicism and hopelessly faked enthusiasm. No sense in wasting miracles, and all that. But there was still something undeniably demonic to him now, an Absence where for the past six thousand years there had been a distinct Presence.

They stared at each other for a little while, angel and demon, until Crowley eventually managed an articulate little squeaking ‘ _ngk’_ noise.

Aziraphale sighed.

“Quite,” he said, a new weariness to his voice that earned him a surprised and mildly concerned look from Crowley. “Are you going to come in, my dear, or are you just sort of going to hover on my doorstep all day?”

Crowley came in quickly, wincing at the sharp noise the door made as it swung shut. He remained standing in the middle of the room, feeling somewhat lost.

“So— we’re both—“

Aziraphale sighed again, and beckoned Crowley over to the back room.

“It would appear so,” he said flatly, and got out the wine.

 

They dealt with this the way they dealt with everything, of course. They got well and truly plastered. The two of them spent a solid half hour simply imbibing as much alcohol as they possibly could, at record speeds— which was rather a lot, when one didn’t actually need to do pesky things like _breathe_ —trying to achieve that nice fuzzy state where everything feels a little bit further away, save for whatever slow, stupid thought is currently dredging its miserable way through the forefront of your brain. They didn’t talk much.

Aziraphale tapped his neat little fingernails on the edge of his wineglass.

“I _liked_ being an angel, you know.”

“ _I_ didn’t,” said Crowley defensively. “Why d’you think I Fell the first time round?”

Aziraphale gave this statement the consideration it deserved, which equated to roughly three seconds worth of time, before taking another swig.

“Hmph. Well, that’s it exactly. _You’ve_ done it all before. I haven’t the foggiest idea of how to go about being a demon.”

Crowley tilted his head at an angle that should not have been quite possible.

“Yeah you do. Just wile instead of thwart, ‘s all.”

Aziraphale waved a hand loosely.

“Well, in _theory_ , I’m sure. But they’re— they’re very different organisations, aren’t they? That’s rather the whole point of them.”

Crowley looked down into his wineglass, and was hit with a general impression of slick, dark redness, and a distorted reflection of his own face, looking rather more haggard than he might like. He was reminded uncomfortably of the sky above the M25.

“Not really,” he found himself saying, and then took a deep, long drink to avoid having to look at the politely baffled look on Aziraphale’s face.

“It’s like,” he tried after a little while, digging into his admittedly rather limited knowledge of all things technological. “It’s like. It’s like that language computers speak. With the two… things.”

Aziraphale pondered this for a moment. His own computational knowledge was a fair bit more substantial than Crowley’s, on account of him actually turning his computer _on_ , on occasion, albeit some twenty years out of date.

“What, with all the ones and zeroes?” he asked, shooting Crowley a suspicious glare. “Which one am I?”

“Whichever you like,” said Crowley, somewhat impatiently. “That’s not the important part. The thing is, though—“

“You’d be the one, I reckon,” Aziraphale said thoughtfully. “All thin, and… pointy.”

“Forget about the ones,” said Crowley wretchedly. He set his glass down on the table with a decisive _clink_. This was, he reckoned, going to take some proper hand gesturing. “In fact, forget about computers all together. Bad example. Too complicated.”

“But you _said_ —“

For a second, in the cool dark behind his sunglasses, Crowley squeezed his eyes tight shut. Then he opened them again, and with angelic patience, began:

“Look, it’s like— think about noughts and crosses. Or heads and tails, or _anything._ The point is, there’s two of ‘em, and—and they’re sort of different, right, at least on the surface, but they’re sort of— _connected_ , at the same time. And the game doesn’t work unless you have both.”

“Two sides of the same coin,” Aziraphale mused. “Literally, in your little metaphor.” He ran his thumb over the pleasingly symmetrical expanse of his clean nails, then opened his mouth, then closed it again. He turned to face Crowley, some of the alcohol vanishing out of his bloodstream as he did so.

“Am I going to have to change my name, do you think?” he asked, slightly nervously. He didn’t, now that he thought about it, know a great deal about what Falling entailed. Crowley had never talked about it much, and it had always seemed like one of those areas where it would be a bit rude to pry. He hadn’t, at that, really properly _Fallen_ , if you got right down to it. No burning wings, or dramatic descent into Hell, or anything quite so showy. That might have given people _ideas_ , after all. The Metatron had just made a complicated sort of gesture with their hand, and Aziraphale had felt his divinity being stripped away.

It had tickled. The whole thing had been dreadfully unpleasant.

Aziraphale had gotten rather used to knowing more than anyone else around him about how the world worked, and to being rather uppity about it. This whole situation was deeply, terribly confusing, and he didn’t like it one bit. He surreptitiously miracled his wineglass full again.

Crowley’s face fell, just a tad. He tried to hide it, but, Aziraphale thought vaguely, if you couldn’t read someone after six thousand years, what was the _point_ of it all?

“If you want. I’m bloody well not changing mine. Took me _ages_ to get Crowley just right, you know.” Crowley picked his glass back up, and sank wearily back into the warm clutches of Aziraphale’s battered old sofa. “‘Sides, what would I change it _to_?”

Aziraphale cocked his head at this.

“It’d be easier for you than me, I’d think. You could always just go back to your old angelic name, you know. Your original one.”

Crowley looked a bit sheepish.

“I, uh. Think I might have forgotten it, to be honest. ‘S been a while, and all. And it always had a few too many syllables for my liking.” He swirled his wine around, watched the dark whirlpooly sort of shape it made appreciatively, and shrugged in a philosophical sort of way. “And it wasn’t— wasn’t _me_ ,” he said grandly, waving his glass in a great arc. Aziraphale couldn't stop a small, sad smile from playing round his lips, watching Crowley, the nervous, _vibrant_ energy that always seemed to crackle off him, the refusal to be still, to fall out of Time, even for a moment.

He made Aziraphale feel very old, sometimes. Very old, and very tired, and a bit like he, too, could do with a nice century-long nap.

He _was_ a demon now, he supposed. And sloth was a sin. You had to take your positives where you could get them.

He shuffled a little closer to his old friend, the newly-minted (newly re-minted?) ethereal aura that clung to his spindly frame, and didn’t so much as look _at_ Crowley, as _through_ him.

Something occurred to Aziraphale, rather suddenly. He blinked, tried to refocus his gaze.

“Your eyes,” he said to Crowley, and it wasn’t a question, but it clearly was. “Are they—“

Crowley inclined his head just a tad, and obligingly peeled his sunglasses off his face. His eyes blinked back at Aziraphale, burnished yellow-gold and snakelike as ever, and Aziraphale breathed a sigh of relief. He couldn’t have said why, but the idea of Crowley with different-coloured eyes— with _human_ eyes, grey or green or blue or brown— made him uncomfortable for reasons he couldn’t quite articulate, even to himself. And besides, he’d rather gotten used to these particular eyes, after so many millennia. He nodded happily.

“Good,” Aziraphale simply, and then remembered, with a pang, that _he_ wasn’t, anymore.

Crowley blinked, slowly, deliberately, long dark lashes tumbling over the brightness of those strange eyes like feathers over fire.

“Is it?” he managed at last, and Aziraphale awkwardly maneuvered himself so that he could pat Crowley on the back.

“Of course it is,” said Aziraphale simply. “Otherwise it wouldn’t be _you._ ”

A slow, fuzzy sort of smile crept over Crowley’s face, and he shifted downwards so he could position his head on Aziraphale’s shoulder. It was a warm weight, and solid, and the ends of Crowley’s dark hair were tickling against Aziraphale’s jaw. Aziraphale sighed and breathed in the scent of him— old and familiar, not anything identifiable, save perhaps for a whiff of self-consciously applied cologne— just— just the smell of _Crowley_. As was.

And Aziraphale was reminded, very suddenly of what the other benefit of falling was supposed to have been. He shook his head slightly, trying to clear it, feeling the gentle brush of Crowley’s head against his. The angel— and wasn’t _that_ an odd thought— looked up muzzily at Aziraphale, slit pupils dilated in a distorted parody of roundness.

“What are you _doing_ , angel?”

“Not anymore, dear,” Aziraphale said softly. Crowley stared guiltily. The old nickname had slipped out quite without Crowley meaning for it to, the force of six thousand years worth of habit. But then of course, six thousand years worth of habit had just been turned right on their heads.

There was a beat of silence, and then Aziraphale let out a long, low sigh.

“I’ll miss it, you know. Being an angel. Well,” he amended, “not all of it. Not Gabriel,” he said decisively—

“Oh, thanks for reminding me I get to spend all of eternity with _that_ bastard now,” Crowley muttered darkly—

“—But, you know, _bits_ of it. When you really, properly help someone. Or when you do your taxes just right, every detail in place Or— or—“ it was harder than Aziraphale might have anticipated for him to come up with any properly angelic activities that Crowley didn’t also partake in.

Crowley didn’t quite seem to share his concerns.

“You could still do all of that, though,” he pointed out pragmatically. “If you wanted. That is, I assume the Arrangement still stands?” There was slightly more nervousness to Crowley's voice than he necessarily would have liked, but Aziraphale politely ignored it.

Aziraphale blinked. The Arrangement. Of course. That was, after all the whole reason for their meeting here, this odd symbiotic relationship that might, at this stage, almost be labeled a friendship. Yes, the Arrangement would sort everything out. Only...

“It’s just, well, what about—about _love_ ,” he said finally, feeling sure that this, at least was a solid, indisputable point.

Crowley wore the oddest expression Aziraphale had ever seen. He cleared his throat somewhat awkwardly.

“What, ah, about— it?”

Aziraphale blinked.

“Well, it’s rather self-explanatory, I should think. Love is a divine emotion, so now that I’m a demon… well, you rather get the point,” said Aziraphale, unwilling for some incomprehensible reason to actually say the words. As though they’d make it realer, somehow. More indelible.

“And I’ll miss it,” he added, with a sad, quiet sort of intensity.

Crowley didn’t seem as enthused or even moved by this as Aziraphale might have hoped. He just gave him a flat sort of stare.

“Nice to know that you had such a high opinion of me,” he said icily.

“It’s not a reflection on _you_ ,” Aziraphale said primly. “Not everything in this blasted universe is always about _you_ , you know.”

“ _Love_ ,” said Crowley slowly, as though he were testing out the syllables. “Load of bollocks, if you ask me.”

Aziraphale shot him a sharp look.

“Mind your language, dear, or you’ll end up back Down Below before you can so much as blink. Well,” he amended. “Not that you blink very often, but you understand...”

Crowley wasn’t listening. His mind, quite suddenly, was filled with the somewhat jarring mental image of being pinballed between Heaven and Hell, over and over, angel and demon and angel again. It seemed like a fairly tedious way to spend the rest of existence.

 _Love._ The blasted word kept sticking in his head. He turned, very slowly, to face Aziraphale. He put his head in his hands, slowly drawing a deep, steadying, and obviously completely superfluous breath.

“You,” he said, enunciating with great care, “are the biggest bloody idiot— you stupid— _you_ —“

Aziraphale stared at Crowley, baffled and mildly offended.

“My dear, really, this seems a tad— _mmph_ ,” finished Aziraphale, rather lamely, because Crowley, expression distinctly irritated and yellow eyes blazing, had stretched forwards, quite suddenly, grabbed Aziraphale’s face with both slender hands, and kissed him.

Aziraphale couldn’t breathe. Not that he needed to. Quickly, all too quickly, Crowley pulled away, and Aziraphale put a hand up to his own lips, quite suddenly feeling oddly lonely, and more than that, oddly _cold_.

Crowley’s eyes had the heat of and intensity of molten steel to them.

“I’ve been madly in love with you for the past two thousand years or so, you _bastard_ ,” he said, seething, “and if _that’s_ your defeatist bloody attitude to the whole thing, then— _then—_ “

And this time it was Aziraphale who pulled him in for a kiss, slower and deeper than the first one. He felt Crowley relax against him, all that jittery energy finally still, the barest hint of teeth and tongue.

“Two thousand years,” Aziraphale said reverently when they finally broke away, eyes shining.

“Give or take,” said Crowley, somewhat gruffly. “And— I mean, do you—“

Aziraphale reached, ever so carefully, for Crowley’s hand, and slowly intertwined it with his own.

“I don’t quite know how long,” he said distantly, somewhat distracted by the cool feel of Crowley’s skin against his, how well they seemed to _fit_. “Sort of seems like forever.” He looked up at Crowley with big eyes, gave an odd sort of smile. “But— but I love you, Crowley,” he said, and the words felt oddly light on his tongue, as though they didn’t really belong to him at all. “And that was— one of the reasons I was all right with falling, because I— I thought it was hopeless, and then I thought it might go away—“ Aziraphale stopped, quite abruptly, because Crowley was stroking his hair. Crowley, those long, clever fingers twining round Aziraphale’s dark curls—

Aziraphale’s mind went a very pleasant sort of blank.

“Think of all the time we wasted,” he murmured. “We really are fantastically incompetent.”

“Think of all the time we still have,” Crowley pointed out, ever the optimist. “It’s ineffable, as you’d say. And besides, if we ever knew what the bloody Hell we were doing, we wouldn’t be _Us_.”

Aziraphale smiled, and Crowley grinned, and snuggled up against him, a tight ball of hair and clothes and soft, warm skin.

 

There were some differences now, of course, and they spent a good while exploring them— when Aziraphale, a good few hours later, made to switch off the lights, plunging the room into soft grey darkness, Crowley made a very awkward sort of gasping noise, small and breathy. Aziraphale hurried over to his angel, concerned.

“Everything all right, dear?”

“I can’t— I can’t _see_ ,” said Crowley. “It’s all just—dark. I always could, before. I suppose that must have been a demon thing, then, not a me thing.” His voice sounded very small, and very lost. Aziraphale blinked, gave his eyes a moment to adjust, and was surprised to realise that he _could,_ looking in unabashed awe at the perfect greyscale rendering of Crowley in front of him, eyes wide and unfocused, and fabulously _unaware_ , as he realised that the dark would never be just the dark again. Very slowly and very deliberately, purposefully leaning in so that the sofa would squeak and alert Crowley to his movements, he came and sat down next to him, wrapping his arms around Crowley and feeling his warm weight sag against him.

Night vision or not, it all looked the same when you closed your eyes.

Things had changed, subtly. Crowley would be able to look after his plants without feeling embarrassed about them, now, and Aziraphale would be able to be a little more, ah, _insistent_ about customers leaving his shop. And after their first respective meetings with Dagon and Gabriel, the pair of them had gotten sloshed off their faces to the extent that any human would not only have had their liver irrefutably damaged by alcohol poisoning, but might even no longer have _had_ a liver. Or a life.

But mainly they were still themselves, always a bit in between, always a bit bad at their jobs. Mainly, they would touch and hug and kiss and try to learn each other’s bodies, in a way that they never had after six thousand years. Mainly, they would enjoy the slow, messy process of being in love.

After some time, they might leave London, and move into a small cottage in the South Downs.

We will leave them there, angel and demon, intertwined, and if you look very closely, you might just be able to guess at which is which.

 

**Author's Note:**

> There's a lot of really beautiful and well-written fic out there about Crowley rising or Aziraphale falling, but idk one of the central themes of good omens to me has always been that when you get down to it, heaven and hell really aren't all that different, and one night of very little sleep later, that sort of spiralled into this. Thanks so much for reading!


End file.
